we all have our own loneliness
by elewho
Summary: It's so easy, just succumbing to the sadness. Yang could stay like that, drowning in emptiness, sleeping on the cracks of her heart, living with the fear of falling. She won't get hurt anymore, nobody can leave her again. She'll find contentment in loneliness. One-shot, just after volume 3, going through Yang's head. Weiss and Ruby stayed to take care of her.


_A/N: So this is a frantically written one-shot. i just had a very hard couple of days, and i, being the productive soul that i am (lmaono), channeled all that sadness and depressing thoughts into writing. I'm not even sure the story makes sense so please forgive me haha._

* * *

Her kind of heartbreak isn't like those in the movies.

The weather isn't a torrential downpour; there're no angry thunder clouds symbolising a dark swirling energy inside her, no howling wind that's supposed to remind of her of voices past. She's not holed up in her room, blinds closed and a tissue bucket nearby. She hasn't vomited her breakfast. Tears are not endlessly streaming from her eyes. Her heart is still beating, her lungs are still breathing and the world is still spinning on its axis around the sun.

No, no.

That's not her kind of heartbreak.

_This_ is her heartbreak:

It actually is sprinkling, one of those thank-Brothers-I-don't-have-to-water-my-plants kind of rain. It's not a complete black out in her room – it's not even _her_ room, she's in the spare room for some reason. There's some light peeping from behind the curtains, telling her it's day despite the grey clouds. Her crying isn't an endless stream of tears. It comes in bursts, like every five minutes her brain suddenly realizes what it's lost. It feels like fresh information, every single time, and her throat squeezes and her eyes burn up.

Yes, her heart is still beating, but her blood is like lead, heavy and slow and poisonous. Her lungs are still breathing, but the air can't get past the anvil in her chest. The world is still spinning, the sun is still shining, but neither of them have the right to.

She hears a small voice outside the door.

"I think she's just in shock...she barely registered her arm was missing before...no, no, it's okay, Tai, don't worry about it. You need to be there. Yes, of course. She's my best friend." It's Weiss, and Yang wants to say her name, but her throat feels dry and rough so she doesn't and just sinks further into the pillows.

Weiss is wrong. She's not in shock. There's no way she's in shock because that would mean she feels nothing but that's wrong she feels everything, and every nerve in her body is alert and threatening to rip themselves to shreds and it is going to _kill _her. There's another scream in her head, one surely for apocalypses and funerals, and she's keeping it in but it's rampaging against her lips to get out.

She does remember screaming at some point. She'd surfaced, with a filter in her eyes that made everything look blurry and she wondered if she needed glasses. She looked around at the clinic white hospital room, saw moving blobs. Then she screamed as soon as she looked down, saw the ugly stub, the bloodied bandages, the ripped skin. _This isn't her this isn't her no no __no__ she does __not__ look like this. _It was like looking down at another person, but when she told her brain to move her arm, the ugly thing moved and she dry heaved. The moving blobs were reaching towards her, yelling for nurses and doctors. She wanted wants wanted wants them to shut up, just shut up for one second so she can _see_.

She doesn't find her in the crowd, not in the hospital room, not in the spare room, not _anywhere_ and she screams again.

Tears are carving rivers down her cheeks as Weiss rushes in, and she wipes them off impatiently. She ignores Weiss, turning towards the window, screwing her eyes shut. She'll wake up soon. This is a dream. She'll wake up next to Blake. This is all a dream.

* * *

_You go to where Weiss points you to, which wasn't at all helpful, but your mind is wrecking itself with worry, you don't take the time to ask for specifics. You run past Atlas robots and students fighting off waves of Beowolves and Creeps. You should probably help – it's your __job__ – but you don't. She matters more._

_Worry is transitioning to anger, and red starts to seep into your vision when you find a White Fang member, a low-ranking one by the looks of the generic monster mask, and you shove him against the wall, one hand at his collar, your other fist cocked and begging for brutal violence._

_"Where's Blake?" you demand._

_"Wh-who? Get off me!"_

_"Blake Belladonna. I know you know her." He has to. "__Where__ is she?" That last question comes out with a growl and the guy visibly withers._

_"I-I-I don't know! I just joined because my cousin told me I was gonna get paid. Looklooklooklook, our leader might know. Taurus. Adam Taurus. He was supposed to be over there. Let me go, let me go."_

_Disgusted, you toss him to the ground. "You're a fucking coward."_

_You start running again, throwing stealth to the wind, calling Blake's name as loud as you can. Destruction is all over the place, even bodies, but you can't bring yourself to look at the corpses, absolutely refusing to even think that she could be one of them. Creeps slow you down, and you punch one so hard, your fist punctures right through its skull and sink an inch into the ground. You keep going, blind and deaf because blood is pumping in your ears and your vision is blurry with tears._

_Rage, worry and guilt intertwine, and right now you force your brain to focus it on Mercury Black. He did something to you. He made you see things, he made you look like a fucking lunatic in front of the whole school, the whole planet. He made you think you're everything Raven knows you are. But all that anger and guilt turns immediately inwards._

_You shouldn't have pushed Blake out. You shouldn't have taken it personally when she doubted you. She had her reasons - you __know__ her reasons – her reasons could very well be the one orchestrating this attack. You should be with her, right next to her, but you're not and it's all, your, fault._

_You eventually find yourself near the cafeteria, fire crawling up the walls like vines, table sand chairs broken like debris after a tornado. You keep yelling. "Blake! Blake, where are you?!"_

_A litany of apologies and please please __please__ be okay is pushing at your throat, but you swallow them in because you're not sure how together you are right now._

_You hear a blood-curling scream and you whirl around._

_After that, your world cracks in half._

* * *

The first week, her brain assaults her with that scene, over and over again and she's sick of it.

She stays awake.

Or tries to, anyway. Her medication takes the pain away, but exhaustion still curls its finger like a hungry mistress. On her scroll, she brings up her and Weiss' text messages, where her friend had sent her remedies for insomnia. She isn't sure what she's expecting, but the first thing she sees is to 'stay active', so she dismisses everything else.

Heat suddenly spreads in Yang's stomach. She winces, tries to blow out the hot air. She tells herself it's the medication, the pain from her arm. But then the heat slithers its way up, wraps itself around her ribcage, her heart, and she can't fool herself anymore.

* * *

Yang gets out of bed one night, looking for water. There's a small nightlight plugged into one of the wall sockets in the living room. The moonlight streaming in between the slits of the blinds doesn't do much; it's overcast. She blinks, slowly recognizing Weiss' sleeping figure on the couch. She has an errant thought that the heiress has probably never slept on a couch before coming to Patch.

She moves quietly to the kitchen, grabs a glass from the cabinet, fills it up from the tap. Then she looks out the window above the sink and everything is on _fire_. She smells the smoke, and her world turns upside down and she sees Adam and Blake again, the tip of the red sword right into Blake's stomach. Her body lurches forward, but she can't move. She opens her mouth to scream but nothing comes out except

"_BLAKE!_"

Her eyes, painfully red, fly open but it's dark. She can't breathe she can't breathe but she's breathing oh oh this is hyperventilating she can't breathe she can't stop. Weiss tells her to take a deep breath and hold it, and Yang reaches for her friend's voice like a lifeline. She does as she's told, gets a hold of herself. She focuses on her breath, in and out, and vision returns to her. She's on the floor, Weiss rubbing useless circles on her back. Another dull pain rises and she looks down. She'd gripped the damn glass too tight, and now her shirt is wet and her damn hand is bleeding with small shards in her palm. She doesn't do anything about it, bone-deep exhaustion weighing her down. She wilts into Weiss, shutting her eyes, her cheeks wet, and she's already dizzy but she focuses on her breathing.

For the past week (or two?), crying has been like breathing.

Necessary.

* * *

She tries to stop.

Just...stop.

She tries to stop thinking, feeling. She tries to stop being a living, breathing human.

It doesn't work when Weiss and Ruby won't stop talking, sitting by her bed, hoping something in the conversation would stir Yang enough to join in. Yang's certain she wants them to go away, just let her be just leave her like everyone else. She can't demand it, but it's still annoying, and they're really not going anywhere so she ends up listening.

Ruby talks about her eyes, how she turned that giant wyvern into stone with some magicky power thing. How their uncle is 'part of like a cult' with Ozpin, Glynda and General Ironwood. Weiss talks about how her father had actually come to Beacon, forcing her to fly back to Atlas. She talked about protecting her home, and how furious it made him. She's no longer the heiress, but she doesn't seem too bummed about it.

See, Yang can handle this, all this catching up, all this new information. What she can't handle is when they start bringing up the past.

"Oh, oh," Ruby starts, apropos of nothing. "Do you guys remember when we pranked Jaune and Ren with that peanut butter jar?"

Weiss struggles, but smiles fondly. "You mean when _you _pranked them."

"Pssh," Ruby waves a hand dismissively. "It was a team effort."

Yang can't handle this because it brings light to habits she never knew she had. It makes her realise that she turns to Blake when she finds something funny. Or when she's proud of how awesomely she took down that Beowolf or that Deathstalker or that whatever, she looks back to make sure Blake it watching. She always is.

So when Ruby and Weiss bring up anecdotes or another nostalgia-laced memory, Yang looks away, drowns them out by screaming herself hoarse inside her head.

* * *

When she finally looks at a mirror, she does a double take.

This must be what looking at another person feels like.

Her hair is in shambles, her eyes are bloodshot and her cheeks are so pale she wonders why she can't see through them. It looks like she'd just escape from a mental asylum, except her clothes are her normal pajamas.

She doesn't recognize this person.

"Yang."

But then this person's eyes gets a dull gleam of acknowledgement at her name, and she realizes that it is her.

Ruby walks behind her, lays a gentle hand at the small of her back.

"It's hard to talk about it."

"I know," Ruby says quietly. "But Weiss and I are here when you're ready. We'll wait for you, I promise."

_When you're ready._ Instinctively, Yang's eyes settle on her arm. It's healed now, which she assumes is owed to Weiss' connections in Atlas. They had sent over more top-of-the-line medications, even a doctor to check up on her. Now, the stump is covered by a metallic plate.

Ruby misreads her silence. "No matter how long it takes."

"Thanks, Rubes."

She gives her a small smile, but there's no light behind it, and she shuts herself in her room.

She was one second away from death. She knows that. Adam could've sliced her in half, with the way she'd come at him so recklessly. But she realizes that he'd aimed for her arm. To make her suffer. To make Blake suffer.

She shouldn't give in. She really shouldn't, she knows she shouldn't, she doesn't want to.

But she plays her part, a broken doll, a deformed ghost of what she once was, because she can't be sure she can ever be ready again.

* * *

Because her body is complaining about being limp and doing nothing for the past two months, Yang is forced to get dressed and go outside.

It surprises Ruby, who sees her first from the couch. "Yang?"

"Hey," is all Yang says before going out.

The smoke from the mainland had finally made its way to the island. Hazy grey covers her vision, and she fights the urge to fan her hand in front of her face. Something brushes against her leg and she jumps, heart immediately in her throat.

"Zwei." Yang tells herself to calm calm _calm_ down. "What are you doing?"

The dog looks up at her, goofy and questioning.

_What are __you__ doing?_

"Go back inside, Zwei."

Zwei stares at her, unblinking. Yang stares back, defiant. They keep it up for a whole minute before Yang's eyes start to water from the smoke. Sighing, she walks to the family oak tree. She'd always come here when she was a kid, her and Ruby. They made up so many games, so many adventures. She doesn't really mean this, but it would be so amazing if she can be as young and naive as she was.

At least that Yang knew what happy meant.

* * *

Her moment of clarity comes after a shitstorm.

She couldn't sleep (again), so she's downstairs on the couch, staring into the dark. She's not really thinking of anything; she figured any place is as good as any to disassociate in. Beside, it's a nice little change in scenery from her bedside window.

For some reason, her uncle pops into her head. It's hard to think of Qrow without thinking of alcohol, so her brain and body follows this thought to the kitchen, where she knew her uncle had stashed his personal stock under the sink. Everything looks untouched, dust and spider webs all over the bottle of tequila and rum.

She stays crouched, eyeing the bottles.

She's never drunk before, not even in parties. One, because she's underage. Two, because her father and uncle had been a very effective _don't drink_ commercial.

But now, she's above legal age. Tai and Qrow aren't here, and Yang suddenly feels all kinds of adventurous and she's heard alcohol really does take the edge off. Besides, this is her first time, it's not like she's immediately an alcoholic who relies on alcohol to deal with the world. She'll be fine, she promises, it's just a few sips. But even then, a small part of her protests: she's still on medication, this will worsen the effects, she'll vomit, she'll wake up Weiss and Ruby and Ruby will get that look on her face that always made Yang feel overly aware of what she was doing.

She can't bring herself to care.

So she sits against the cabinets, bottle of tequila braced between her legs as she unscrews the top and take a swig. Her face contorts, pinches, lips pursed and brows furrowed. She coughs a little, her throat burning from the kick. It settles hotly into her stomach, which she belatedly realizes is empty so this will be even worse – or better – than she thought.

She really should've eaten before this.

Should've, could've, would've.

Whatever.

* * *

Inevitably, she gets drunk.

She's conscious enough to stop, so she just sits there, still in darkness, with an open bottle of tequila, trying not to laugh because this really is fucking hilarious.

She's worked all her life to not be alone, to prove to people that she's worth keeping around, worth staying for, worth _choosing_. So isn't it fucking ironic that she's completely alone and left and forgotten _again_ like the dispensable trash she is? It's super funny that she has to be discarded a _second_ time for the lesson to really sink in. Wow, she really is that stupid and desperate.

Out of nowhere Blake emerges from the recesses of her mind and scowls at her.

_What the hell are you doing?_

Drinking. What of it? Why? Huh? Wanna join?

_This isn't you. You're better than this._

Right, right. Because I'll believe you. You're not even here I'm talking to myself.

_Get up, Yang. You're better than this. You are._

Fuck you. You don't know me.

_Getupgetupgetupfuckyougetupfuckfuckgetup—_

"Yang. Yang. Get up. Damn it, what did you do?!"

Someone hauls her to her feet, and her head lolls forward. She barely lasts a second before bile hurls out of her, hitting the floor with a splat. Someone sighs, someone else curses and she blacks out.

* * *

When she wakes up, disappointment and embarrassment descend over her like a hangover.

_Shit_.

She blearily looks around. She's back in the spare room, neatly tucked in. She looks at her stub (she always does this for some reason, like it'll magically grow back overnight) before her eyes settle on Weiss, who's sitting by her bed, staring at her in anger and disgust.

_Double shit_.

She supposes she should start groveling. She begins with, "I'm sorry."

"You're an idiot."

Taken aback by the tone, Yang's eyes widen. "I—"

"Ruby and I lost Blake, too, you know. You're not the only one who's grieving."

A spear of resentment shoots through Yang. "You have no idea what you're talking about."

"Don't I?" Weiss shoves out of the chair in a move that eerily reminds Yang of herself. "I just cut myself off my entire family just to protect this kingdom. I lost Blake, and I nearly lost you, too."

Yang says nothing, tries to tell herself nothing Weiss is saying matters.

"You're _lucky_ you're alive. That's what this is, Yang. You're _lucky_. And now you're going to throw your second chance away, with alcohol of all the idiotic _bullshit_, because what, you feel like you're all alone?"

"I _am_ alone!" Angry tears sting her eyes, clawing her throat, cracking her voice. It's been weeks since she's cried; she thinks she's forgotten how. "Blake left us!" _Me_. "She ran away!" She ran away from _me_.

"She did what she thought was right!"

"You're taking _her_ side?"

"There are no _sides_, Yang. She ran away to protect you, why can't you see that?" Weiss sighs, easing down on the bed and grips Yang's hand in hers. "She thinks that she brought all of this to Beacon. The worst thing that she thought would happen, happened. _You_ got hurt. Because of her past. The universe just...proved her right."

"I never blamed her."

"She doesn't see it that way. You know that."

"I don't know anything."

"You know she loves you."

Yang does know that, and it hurts. Because you don't just leave someone you love, you take care of them, you make sure they're okay and you stay with them. But Blake's not here, and Yang just feels...lost.

"The question now, I think, is will you prove her wrong? That the world isn't against her, that she's not better off alone. Or will you stay here, and let her believe she was right in her choice? You don't have to answer," Weiss adds. "Just...food for thought."

"Okay," is all Yang manages.

Guilt starts to creep in Weiss' eyes. "I'm sorry for yelling."

"...it's okay. I...needed to hear that. Everything you said."

Weiss wraps her arms around Yang's head, and tears prick her eyes again. "You're not alone," Weiss assures.

"I can't forgive her."

"That's okay."

"Not yet."

"Mm-hmm."

"But I'll work on it."

"Good."

Yang sighs when Weiss pulls away, heading for the door. A small frown forms when Weiss stops at the doorway and turns around.

"We know where she is, by the way."

Yang stares at her.

"Before he left for Mistral, Neptune told us Sun had followed her onto a ship. It's headed for Menagerie. So." Weiss meets her eyes, steady, unwavering. "When _you're_ ready, Yang. When you stop being heartbroken and you realise your Blake needs you again. We'll come with you."

* * *

Blake has always been _her_ Blake, hasn't she? Since that moment in the forest. And she's always been Blake's Yang.

Blake's Yang wouldn't have spent the last four maybe five months wallowing in self-pity. Blake's Yang would've treated her lost of limb like a scratch, would've packed a bag, hitched a ride to the mainland, to Junior's club, demanding answers for yet another missing person. She supposes going through a heartbreak would do that to a person.

It's so easy, just succumbing to the sadness. She could stay like that, drowning in emptiness, sleeping on the cracks of her heart, living with the fear of falling. She won't get hurt anymore, nobody can leave her again. She'll find contentment in loneliness.

But she thinks about Ruby. Her sister has her own version of loneliness, she's sure. Mild absentee father, lifeless sister, her team torn apart, her friends dead. Yang may have been out of it when Ruby was talking about her silver eyes, but she recognized the fear, the childish need for someone to just make everything better. That should've been Yang, and what a great job she's done.

She thinks about Weiss. Estranged from her family. Yang's family may not be a shining example, but it's nice knowing she always had something to fall back to. Weiss had chosen her found family over her birth. Sure, it was her choice but there had to have been some guilt, maybe doubt. Yang hasn't made such a great case in being worth the choice.

And Blake.

Her Blake.

She'd convinced herself that she was better off alone, that the world was much safer if she just lurked in the shadows. Her past was just too dark, her core too black and bad that she'd built walls so high and thick to close herself in rather than keep people out. Yang had changed that; she gave Blake a world in color, showed her what it really meant to live instead of survive.

And Yang knew that wasn't all selfless. It gave her great joy to paint that canvas, swallowing lightning when she coaxes a laugh out of Blake. And she remembers watching Blake break down her own walls, brick by painstaking brick, and she remembers finally knowing what Blake really is on the inside.

Beautiful.

* * *

So, three days later, when the sun rises above the forest canopy and shines through the window, she absorbs it like fuel to a fire. Because Weiss and Ruby were right; it all depended on _when_ she was ready. She'd lost her way, but it was never a question of if.

She fingers an old picture, the one she'd sent back home to Tai. Young and unknowing. Ruby had a peace sign up, Weiss's hand draped over her shoulder. Blake, reclusive as she was, even had a smile on her face. And Yang herself, a cheeky wink and a grin that would've outshined multiple suns.

They can't go back to this, no. They've grown too much.

But they can move forward, build new smiles, new memories.

All she has to do is take the first step.


End file.
